[RAPAPORT] "Some 68% of Americans don’t consider synthetics to be real diamonds, with most citing the fact that they don’t come from the earth, a Diamond Producers Association (DPA) poll showed.

Another 16% of those surveyed said they weren’t sure if a diamond created in a factory was real, while the remaining 16% believed they were real.

The survey — conducted online by The Harris Poll — asked 2,011 US adults about lab-grown diamonds to understand if consumers considered them authentic, what they thought a “real” diamond was, and whether they were confused about the differences between natural diamonds and those created in a laboratory.

“Diamonds are billion-year-old treasures of the earth that came to us very, very slowly, which makes them uniquely meaningful in today’s on-demand world,” said Jean-Marc Lieberherr, CEO of the DPA. “At a time when everything ‘artificial’ aims to compete with, and replace, ‘natural’ and ‘real,’ these results show consumers care about the inherent value, authenticity and symbolism that a diamond carries.”

The results are important to the industry because they confirm that a diamond’s “real” origin matter to consumers, Lieberherr said. Additionally, the findings prove that those who make and sell synthetics create confusion in the marketplace by calling them “real,” which goes against the DPA’s terminology standards, he argued.

The DPA also conducts a survey every six months of millennials who have bought a diamond over the past two years, measuring consumer sentiment toward synthetics. Millennials’ views of synthetics have remained stable, according to the survey. However, the number of people who said they would buy lab-grown diamonds for a major event, such as a birthday, engagement or the birth of a child, has dropped since the last poll.

The results of the two surveys, as well as the falling prices of lab-grown stones, show that US consumers understand the higher value of a “real” diamond, Lieberherr added."